Mark Byron

Hey, You Gave Us the Word "Gaudy"

Interesting piece from Barcelona, where a futuristic hotel complex is propose for a man-made island just off the coast.

With an initial investment of 1.5 billion euros (£1.27 billion), the hotel complex will also include a 24 hour shopping mall, a marina capable of mooring yachts up to 656 feet in length, and private apartments, some of which will be available on a "timeshare" system of 20,000 euros for an annual one-week occupancy right.

Usally, the city fathers love such big projects (this slow-motion one in Lexington comes to mind) and it's preservationists and anti-rich folks who raise the red flags, but not here,

"We have no need or desire to take on projects of this nature," Xavier Trias, the mayor from Catalonia's centre-right nationalist CiU party, said in an interview with the Catalan news channel 3/24, while admitting the City Hall will give the proposal due consideration.

"We are a city of culture, knowledge, of creativity, and of innovation, and our project (for the city) will follow a different path."

"We have no intention of turning Barcelona into a spectacle," he added.

Well, I recall y'all hosted the 1992 Olympics and one of the cultural touchstones of the coverage was the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, including the tower-happy Sagrada Família church that seemed to be the unofficial landmark of Barcelona like the Opera House is for Sydney.

The proposed project seems to have some architectural applied knowledge, a bit of creativity and some innovation, albeit aimed at very rotund felines (but, as Willie Sutton said, that's where the money is); Gaudi's work already has the city in the spectacle camp. That horse has already left the bard, X-man.

It could be that this project screams multinationalism and that runs counter to the anti-EU and anti-Madrid vibe that Catalan nationalists (think Quebec-Canada as a Catalonia-Spain analog with a bit less bile) looking down their noses at the project with a bit of anti-modernist vibe thrown in.

Here's to You, Mrs. Robertson

Duck Dynasty is doing well for itself; its season finale was the highest rated show on TV that night, cable or broadcast, even beating out a somewhat limping American Idol. That's not the first time that a cable show has owned the evening, which is a very odd concept for a kid who grew up on three networks and PBS.

However, it is a DD-related story that had the chatty-ring locked and loaded; it was an ad I saw in the Detroit Free Press earlier in the week, where one of the DD clan is slated to be in-state next week at a "Michigan Internationa Women's Show."

Faith, family and ducks are at the center of A&E’s most watched series, Duck Dynasty. Duck Dynasty is the story of the Robertson family who launched Duck Commander, a homegrown mom-and-pop operation that has become a sporting empire of top-of-the-line duck calls and decoys made out of salvaged swamp wood.

Meet Jessica Robertson Saturday at 2pm at the Fashion & Entertainment Stage. Jessica is the wife of the youngest Robertson son, Jep, a busy mother to their four kids (Lily, Merritt, Priscilla, and River) and involved in expanding the family business. She’ll be sharing stories about life in Louisiana and the importance of family, and answering all your Duck Dynasty questions.

The near-ultimate red-state gal heads into the blue-state territory of Novi, a northwestern edge city of Detroit. A "Woman's show" done in a feminist vein would go into Palin Derangement Syndrome over an evangelical mom of four who helps run a duck-hunting supply company; the other guests won't trigger PDS nearly as much with Lifetime and Huffington Post pedigrees.

Upscale gals might not like her, but blue-collar Michiganders would dig her. Hunting is a blue-collar pastime in Michigan; the first day of firearm deer hunting season, November 15, is all but a state holiday. Lest we forget, even Michael Moore from Flint, just a half-hour commute (if traffic cooperates) from Novi, is a NRA guy, since shoprats often are hunters up here.

Rochester Hills and Farmington Hills might not get it, but closer-in Royal Oak will.

 

A Big Walk-Out Closet

It's interesting that we've yet to see a major-league male athlete "out" himself while he was playing; a few have come forward after they retired, with John Amaechi being the most notable to me. I recall liking him as a player, a thoughtful Brit that didn't fit the dumb jock mode, but we found out after the fact that he really didn't fit the mold.

On the woman's side, the taboo isn't as big of an issue. Martina Navratilova played a good chunk of her career out and a number of WNBA gals have announced their honorary citizenship of the isle of Lesbos.

It became a bigger issue today, 6'8" big. The first pick in the recent WNBA draft, Brittney Griner, outed herself. She's good enough to be considered a NBA prospect, as Dallas Mav's owner Mark Cuban has mused about using a second-round pick on her for the regular NBA draft, or at least giving her an invite to training camp.

She might be a bit skinny to make it in the NBA, as she'd either need to get some muscle to play power forward with the guys or get an outside game to move to the small forward position. However, she's a dunking, shot-blocking freak of a talent among the distaff side; Anthony Davis at 7'3" might be a male analogue.

One of the things that comes to mind on the outing is that she's a senior at Baylor. Baptist Baylor... center-left Baptist, but Baptist nonetheless. She might have had some problems with the school's code of conduct had she gone public sooner, like the BYU guy two years ago who got kicked off the team for pre-marital sex.

It would be interesting if the first openly gay NBAer was a woman; she wouldn't have to worry about getting hit on, just getting hit driving to the rack

Our Marriagist System

In the comments in the last post, my libertarian-leaning friend Alan put in a plug for getting the government out of the marriage business-"No workplace discrimination against singles ever more." As a mature single, he's been on the short end of that stick all his life.

Here's an interesting Atlantic piece from earlier this year that itemizes the cost of being single. They even miss the tendency that Alan likes to note to stick the single folks with overtime to let the married folks have more time with their families; that might be a financial boon to the singles if they get time-and-a-half, but if they're merely given comp time when they might not need it, it's a pain in the butt for the put-upon single.

If you're looking at the individual as the key unit in society, Alan and other folks have a point. However, we're subsidizing marriage for a reason; kids do better with two parents than one, and getting people into marriage helps civilize guys. That's going to be a problem China will run into in the next few years as the guy surplus created from their one-child policy creates a caste of single guys locked out of the conventional mating market and getting into more trouble than their married peers.

How much is the positive externalities of marriage worth? Good question. Enough to at least give some benefits to marrieds. Yes, that does mean that singles get "screwed" as individuals, but society as a whole is better off. For most folks who eventually have kids, they will get the benefit down the line but be on the short end while single; the barren folks don't get the benefits and are shorted, but not everyone gets perfect fairness in life.

Eileen works with special-ed kids. They're getting more money spent on them per-capita than normal kids; some of the more problematic kids have a teacher's aide (paraeducator in modern ed-speak) dedicated to them, which makes them multiple times more expensive than a conventional classroom pupil who can have their teacher run herd over a couple dozen kids.

However, we want to take care of these kids and see if they can get to a point of being somewhat self-sufficient and do stuff as adults. That takes spending more money than hard equity would dictate, but should produce a better society in the long run.

Just as special-ed kids get more money spent on them than their less-challenged peers, married folks get more bennies than single folks. It's not "fair" but it makes for a better society.

Try Gang Control

An ad on my Facebook Scrabble game pleaded that "Gun violence is out of control." Actually, it is lower than it has been in the past, but on one level, it's always out of control. The only controlled gun violence would be done by the police or the military.

To the extent that we have freedom, crime is out of the control of the government; we're not to the Minority Report level where they keep you from doing crimes ahead of time. A ban on firearms merely takes such weapons out of the hands of law-abiding citizens; states with more permissive gun laws actually have less gun violence per capita.

The vast majority of gun crime is gang-related. That's not going to be easily stopped by banning big clips or whatever makes Sen. Feinstein uneasy. That takes changing the youth and young adult culture, mostly (but not exclusively) in tougher parts of town; for most gangsters, firearms violations will likely be a mere tack-on to other more-serious charges they face if and when the cops catch up to them.

We have a small handful of mass murders each year, but the bigger problem with gun crime isn't the exurban psycho going postal at a school or theater every so often. Detroit had 378 murders this year; that's over a Sandy Hook a month, but it's generally done one or two at a time, so we don't have the center-left punditry up in arms over it.

Any gun control law that passes Second Amendment muster won't make much of a dent in that. It might slow down the otherwise law-abiding gunner from doing damage, but it won't do much to stop the few-at-a-time violence that claims far more folks than the big events that make the news.

"Where are the Bimbos?"

I've been saying that someone was going to snap up Hostess... it looks like the leading candidate is Grupo Bimbo, a big Mexican bakery.

Mexico’s Grupo Bimbo, the world's largest bread-baking firm, could be on the short list for acquiring some of the Texas-based Hostess’ foodstuffs, according to Forbes. Grupo Bimbo already owns parts of Sara Lee, Entenmann’s and Thomas English Muffins.

They already have a niche market under their own name in areas with large Latin populations; I recall them from Florida. One grand-daughter of a churchmate was a fan; a good joke from the era had her loudly asking at a supermarket "Where are the Bimbos?"

Bimbo seems well-position to do the deal-the asking price on Hostess is estimated at $135 million and Bimbo has $200 million cash on hand.

That isn't quite a done-deal. Any number of competitors, such as Peperage Farm and Little Debbie's parent companies, could come away Ho-Holding the bag.

Getting Past De-Fence

Here's an interesting piece on cultural fragmentation from Jeffrey Brown, who anchors the PBS News Hour. Back in the pre-Web era, I recall watching that show, back when it was McNeil-Lehrer, for it did good long-form reporting and discussion on issues that went beyond the headlines and the quick observation. Since then, I tend to not watch much TV news unless there is a major breaking item that doesn't lend itself to the Web.

Brown discusses the more combative nature of modern political discourse, closing with this imagry-

To make that point, he quoted from an interview with Israeli novelist David Grossman, whom Brown said tries to keep a focus on basic human problems in a place where it is all to easy to be overwhelmed by political issues and security problems.

"We are now in danger of becoming like a suit of armor, but without the knight inside," Brown recalled Grossman saying.

The more we feel under attack, the more we retreat to a siege mentality. We spend a lot of our energy defending against attacks and less on doing productive and constructive things.

The Armor of God doesn't restrict one from moving forward with life; the rhetroical armor we put up can do so, expecially if we go to confrontation mode as a matter of course.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/10/30/173073/pbs-newsman-sees-danger-in-fragmented.html#storylink=cpy

Savile Row

Interesting but sad story out of England, where their analogue to Dick Clark, Jimmy Savile, turned out to be a bisexual Jerry Sandusky, using his TV shows and children's charities to find targets; he seemed to have a taste for teeny-bopper girls. He died about a year ago, and victims have been coming out of the woodwork, closing in on 300.

The trend of suspecting the pedophile but not saying anything seems to strongly overlap with the Sandusky case, as well as using the charities to surround himself with jail-bait. Now, his enablers are under the microscope.

Mo's Better

I'm familiar with the literary term "magical realism" to describe some Latin writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, who bagged a Nobel lit prize 30 years ago. This year's winner, Chinese author Mo Yan, seems to play a twist on that theme.

The Swedish Academy praised his work which "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

Those two might overlap (Magic Mushroom Realism?), but Mo would have been hard-pressed to be reading a lot of western avaunt-guard lit while being in the PLA, so he might have stumbled into that style on his own.

Interestingly, Mo's been able to do his work without running afoul of the authorities by and large. Setting stories in the past has allowed him to write without being directly critical of the Communist government, only getting into trouble when things got too sexy.

 

Mongo Like Heaven

News of Alex Karras' kidney failure was in the Detroit papers yesterday; before I got a chance to do a pre-obit, he would up dying on me. He was a bit ahead of my time as a Lions lineman famous for terrorizing Bart Starr in the 1962 Thanksgiving day game that handed the Packers their only loss of that year.

To non-football fans, he'd be noted as an actor, playing Webster's adopted dad and playing Mongo in Blazing Saddles. Sad to see him go; if you don't get the title, watch the clip.

How Royce Rolls

Interesting piece on NBA rookie Royce White, who has a fear of flying as part of a broader package of psych issues he's dealing with. He's looking for an OK from both his new Houston Rockets team and the NBA to let him be driven to road games where possible rather than fly with the team.

What I found disheartening is the number of fans dissing White and anyone having sympathy for him, along with a bunch of armchair psychoanalysis that made me glad I hadn't had lunch, yet.

Kindness is one of the Fruits of the Spirit, but it isn't common in the sports world, or even many churches when it comes to psych issues; a lot of churchmen would be questioning the faith of someone struggling with such issues. A lot of such problems are more medical than self-inflicted; as much as churches might hate psychology and psychiatry for it's problematic take on a number of issues, it does have its place.

To the jocks who were dissing White and have the latest copy of Madden; your dude had the same problem. He would take the Maddencruiser between Monday Night games; he did have the luxury of having a week between games, which White won't have. Back-to-backs in Orlando and Detroit would mean a 18-hour drive and a snug fit.

Pork Fat Abdicates

"I keep having this horrible dream that the world runs out of bacon"

"Rub some bacon on it."

 

Well, we might not run out, but it might not be a bad time to eat kosher or halal; it might cut your food costs.

Britain's National Pig Association, "the voice of the British pig industry," warned recently that a global shortage of bacon and pork "is now unavoidable" because of shrinking herds.

The trade group reported Thursday that annual pig production for Europe's main pig producers fell across the board between 2011 and 2012, a trend that "is being mirrored around the world." The group tied the decline to increased feed costs, an effect of poor harvests for corn and soybeans.

Well, we have cows getting fed gummy worms; what do we feed pigs?

It's been a while since I saw Emeril on TV, but one of his stock phrases was "Pork fat rules!" Since then, it seems like every other new hamburger has bacon on it and even doughnuts have bacon on it these days.

If prices go high enough, it will prompt producers to raise more squealers for the future; supply and demand will work shortages out of the market if the market is allowed to function. In the short term, your BLTs and your Christmas ham got a bit pricier.

To Kill a Mocking Hebdo

I spent some time last night doing a word-search on mock in the Bible. Mocking is stuff the bad guys do. I saw one positive reference to mocking in Proverbs 1, where Wisdom states to the folks who ignore his advice "I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you; I will mock when calamity overtakes you."

This morning, I bopped over to Get Religion, where they had a piece on Wednesday on the latest Arab Street-inflamer in the form of the French mag Charlie Hebdo. They have an Arab guy in a wheelchair being pushed by a Haradi on the cover-

The text balloon states “You must not mock”, but there is also the undertone of “Make my day” here also. Last November the offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed after they put Muhammad on the cover of their magazine and ran some distasteful cartoons inside the magazine.

Of course, CH mocks away once again, and French embassies are having to board up the windows.

Teasing and mocking doesn't make for good rhetoric; it doesn't endear you to the target and makes you look thugish. In this case, there seems to be little benefit from insulting Muslims other than a juvenile desire to make fun of others outside your in-group. We see that in politics, where liberals will make fun of conservatives for the amusement of their fellow progressives and conservatives follow suit.

Making fun of Mohammad's sexual habits isn't going to win anyone over to Jesus; making a negative case for another religion (and a lame one at that) doesn't make a case for yours. Likewise, making fun of Sandra Fluke's virtue (or lack thereof) isn't going to make a good case for allowing religious opt-outs on reproductive drugs.

Psalm 1 hits it on the head-

¹ Blessed is the one
    who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
    or sit in the company of mockers,
² but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
    and who meditates on his law day and night.

That's at the front of the playlist for a reason.

A Randy Travis 45...Stuck on Stupid.

When I'm teaching a finance class and various perpetuity models come up, I inevitably break into a little Randy Travis. "Return = Next Year's Dividend/ Price + Growth rate, assuming the growth rate stays constant forever and ever, amen."

I can't sing while tutoring via whiteboard, but I referenced that just now and found a student who wasn't conversant in country music (my last teaching gig was in Kentucky). I told him that Travis was in the news for all the wrong reasons this month.

I didn't know that Travis had just gone for the bad PR hat trick yesterday. I knew the first two strikes on the docket...

A few weeks after being arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated, Travis was cited in a simple assault case Thursday after a disturbance with another man outside the Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas

...but Travis went for the trifecta-

The streak of bad luck continues for country music superstar Randy Travis.

On Saturday morning, police in Frisco, Texas, confirmed his pick-up truck was found abandoned and heavily damaged in a field. The department told NBC 5 DFW the vehicle was found in a field near the intersection of Lebanon and Legacy. 

No charges have been filed so far. Other media sources reported it does not appear Travis was driving at the time of the wreck.

As they'd say in those parts, Randy, bless your heart.

Civil War Discourse

Drudge played up this Washington Post piece a few days ago that showed the Army war-gaming on paper a Tea Party militia take-over of a South Carolina town in 2016. Something along those lines is plausible, but would most likely take place on a smaller scale than Darlington; a small town in Idaho or Montana would be more likely be a candidate for an armed succession.

However, my bigger concern for a 2016 nightmare scenario is whole states succeeding. If we take a pessimistic economic and cultural projection out 4 years, runaway spending and higher taxes coupled with an increase in political violence both from Occupiers and renegade rightists could have some states declaring independence rather than stay a part of a downgraded, deteriorating US. A governor and state legislature could declare independence, call up the National Guard and dare Washington to invade.

What they might want to also roll-play out is what 2016 might look like under a Romney administration. If we extrapolate things like the Occupiers, Wikileaks and Anonymous, a disgruntled and emboldened anarchosocialist left could make the Web unusable and declare more liberal cities independent. A literal People's Republic of Santa Barbara (for example) might take shape, and if Jerry Brown opts to bid them adieu without a fight, Marines might have to head north from their San Diego-area bases to restore US sovereignty.

Even a second Obama term might see some of that. If Obamacare needs to be scaled-back some as it gets rolled out, the left might see that anarchic action would bring better results than democratic efforts. Couple that with Obama's less-than-leftist take on drones, Gitmo and possibly Iran and Syria if we fast forward a year or two, the hard left might see Obama as Tweetledummer and act accordingly.

Yes, I hear you in the back right-good bye and good riddance. No, they'll likely make a mess of their new republic and be begging back in a decade or two later.

Thankfully, the modern left doesn't like guns as a group; their pacifist streaks makes them bad insurgents. For instance, one has to be thankful that today's shooter at the Family Research Council wasn't a well-prepared gun nut like the Aurora Joker.

However, they can make things miserable to a point where giving in to their demands, if feasible, might be the path of least resistance; that has often been the case in France. The ongoing student protests in Quebec have the government struggling to make modest moves to increase tuition; such street action, if rewarded, can become common.

We live in interesting times. Pray that they don't get too much more interesting.

Ignorance, But not Apathy

The SPLC actually is back to earning its keep; we have a solid ID on the Sikh-shooter, Wade Page. He was in a white-power rock band, End Apathy.

Nikki Haley, the Sikh-turned-Methodist governor of South Carolina, comes to mind. This could have just as easily been her family's facility (her folks are still Sikh) had our shooter moved to SC rather than Wisconsin; his band is based out of North Carolina, so there but the grace of God went the governor's clan.

This isn't a right-left thing; it's folks turning their frustrations onto the not-us. Sikhs are about as good-citizens as they come, at least in the Anglosphere diaspora, but the turbans and beards of the guys demark them as something Joe Skinhead isn't used to seeing.

I'm reminded of the old joke-What's the difference between ignorance and apathy? "I don't know and I don't care." Mr. Page may not have known exactly what he was dispatching, but he did care, enough to kill.

Xenophobia on Steroids

"Skinhead" is the operative word on yesterday's Sikh-killer-"...members described the attacker as a bald, white man, dressed in a white T-shirt and black pants and with a 9/11 tattoo on one arm -- which "implies to me that there's some level of hate crime there."

It may well have been that the Sikhs were fer'ners and that was enough; he may also have had the Sikhs falsely IDed as Muslims of some sort. Even if it was a false ID, the six folks at the temple are still dead, just like the Chinese guy who got killed in metro Detroit years ago (30 years already? Time flies) when folks took out their frustrations on Japanese car companies doing a number of the Big Three on the nearest available Asian.

By the way, Southern Poverty Law Center folks, this is a one-man hate group, if the early evidence pans out. Six more people dead than all the Chick-fil-A fans rung up in their venom-dripping chicken-sandwich runs last week. Please get back to keeping track of Nazis, skinheads and other violent bigots like yesterday's shooter (where you rock on toast) and leave the gardern-variety theocons to People for the American Way or Bene's blog.

Chicken with Pickles... Lots of Pickles

Eileen, having grown up in metro Houston, likes Chick-fil-A, and we've been known to hit their stores where we're in their territory. I have fond memories of stopping to meet friends with little ones in Ocala and Richmond, KY and getting a peppermint shake for Eileen from the store just a few blocks up the road from Sullivan U when she was under the weather.

Folks are planning a buy-in for Chick-fil-A on 8/1, but I'm not in position to do much. The nearest store is an hour-and-a-half away, as the only store in Michigan is on the Oakland U campus; good luck getting that contract under the current circumstances, since it's a state school in Detroit's northern suburbs.

From looking at the store roster, they have made their way into Ohio in numbers, even having a store in the Chapel Hill area of NE Akron which was part of my home turf while at Kent State.

Not much to add that hasn't been chimed in with elsewhere, except that even some level-headed liberals are questioning the wisdom of having cities block stores for their theology. When you're getting called out by Bloomberg, you're well left of center.

 

Goin' to the (Cross-Free) Chapel

Interesting story on Tokyo Disneyland accommodating a lesbian couple's wish for a Disney wedding. However, it isn't the gay rights angle (Japan's behind the US curve on the issue) that intrigued me, but this passage-

Higashi, 27, and her partner could "marry" at the park, they were told, but only if they dressed "like a man and a woman." Park officials were worried that other visitors might be offended by the sight of two women in wedding dresses or morning suits.

The park relented on dress code after a storm of protest on Twitter and other social media — it had all been a misunderstanding by an individual employee, it said — but the couple will not be allowed to exchange vows in the park's chapel due to "Christian teachings."

That is very interesting to me, since Disney parks in the US are essentially God-free zones; their Main Street is one of the few without a church on it. It's not that Disney is anti-Christian per-se, but its universe has lots of magic and supernatural stuff and no bows to speak of to any organized religion.

Here's a nice piece on Tokyo Disney weddings, including shots of a very nice chapel on-site. Note that there is no cross or other Christian iconography to be seen. It lets couples have an American-looking wedding without any direct spiritual overtones.

That fits the Japanese love of American culture if not American theology; unlike Korea, which is plurality Christian, Japan hasn't found Jesus much, but they love the Santa side of Christmas and the pomp and decor of an American church for a wedding.

Swiss Mrs.

Mark Kirkorian beat me to the headline, but it was too obvious to go unused; Michelle Bachmann and her family are now Swiss citizens as well as US citizens. Her husband is of Swiss descent and they took advantage of that "loophole." I'm not sure what advantages that might have, other than allowing use of a Swiss passport that would let you visit Cuba or other places that are on poor terms with Foggy Bottom.

Kirkorian, the Corner's resident immigration hawk, doesn't like it, and that's not an uncommon response. Politicians with dual citizenship are looked at askance for questionable loyalties.

A Canadian case is new NDP leader Thomas Mulcair's French co-citizenship via his French-born wife. He was in position to congratulate fellow lefty François Holland's win as a fellow Frenchman. Mulcair and former Liberal leader Stephane Dion have gotten flak for their literal French-Canadian legal status.

I doubt that Congresswoman Bachmann will have a bias towards cutting the Swiss slack on banking policy due to this new status. It almost seems like a flag of convenience, like companies setting up shop in Delaware for their loose corporate governance laws or ships flying Panama or Liberia's flag for their light regulation on shipping.

I'm the uncle of three dual-citizens; they're being raised here and will likely be as American as I am but likely a bit less American than the gung-ho nationalist Bachmann. I wouldn't be fearful of her becoming a pacifist, isolationist Swiss fifth column.

The Second Unforgivable Sin

Interesting move in California, where they are looking to regulate "reparative" de-gaying therapies, banning it for teens and giving warning disclaimers for adults wanting to give such therapy a shot-

The bill would prohibit so-called reparative therapy for minors and obligate adults seeking the treatment to sign a release form that states that the counseling is ineffectual and possibly dangerous.

This is an area that has hot-buttons on both sides. On one side, you have the psych community, who doesn't see homosexuality as something to be treated and thus discourages trying to; it does tend to put someone on a guilt trip if they can't shake same-sex urges and see them as sinful and problematic. Leading someone to despair and suicidal thoughts trying to change something that isn't seen as wrong is a bad thing. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" might be the mantra of the psychologist.

On top of that, you have the gay lobby that wants to stress the idea that they're "born this way" (as Ms Gaga puts it) and that such therapy is fruitless.

There's another side that would beg to differ, where they do see something wrong with it and do see worth in trying. Part of the problem on the "ineffectual" description is that you have a religious world view of the reparative therapists which is using spiritual tools that don't fit into a psychologist's paradigm and thus don't double-blind test well.

There's a overlap with the problems Teen Challenge has when dealing with secular drug rehab folks dissing their program; the evangelical and often-Pentecostal nature of TC seems to work well, but doesn't fit the classic mold because of the unorthodox nature of bringing the Holy Spirit to bear on the problem.

Combine that with the fact that the psychologists don't even accept that there is a problem to be solved in this case, and the RP folks are looked askance at, especially when you have the born-this-way lobby adding their two cents in.

Could trying make someone suicidal? I wouldn't be surprised. It is a tough nut to crack in many cases, and stories like Ray Boltz's point out that there are some folks that just don't take to such therapy.

However, there are some people it does help, and if your world-view and faith wants you to move away from same-sex attraction, it might be worth a shot. Some folks are bisexual with a same-sex bias, and those people have a better shot of responding that those that aren't switch-hitters.

The problem comes when you have people driven to despair by their inability to change as they run head-long into a church culture that has two unforgivable sins, grieving the Holy Spirit and same-sex attraction [insert Andy Stanley quip here]. People who would cut a drug addict or an addicted smoker or a fat person struggling to get his appetite under control some slack won't give the same grace for someone who struggles with same-sex attraction. That's where you get the suicides and other depression issues that the critics are concerned about, when the second unforgivable sin gets judged to the hilt.

The bill is unlikely to pass, for there are tons of First Amendment issues at play; it reminds me a bit of recent moves in CA to ban circumcision. In that case, the Jewish community had some sway with swing voters and those who sided with them on religious-liberty grounds. It would be interesting if some chits were cashed in from that battle on this one.

Looks Like We'll Need a Bigger Containtment Area

The much-ballyhooed North Carolina same-sex-marriage ban passed 61-39. If I'm not mistaken, such a bill has yet to be voted down anywhere, as all of the states that have same-sex marriage did it either by judicial decree or by legislative vote.

North Carolina did vote for Obama last year, as its urban and high-tech areas are bringing in more secular folks. That showed up in the voting patterns-

The amendment was trailing in Charlotte, in the Triangle counties around Raleigh and Chapel Hill, as well as the Winston-Salem-Greensboro area, according to figures from the State Board of Elections. But it was winning by wide margins in rural counties and in the suburbs of Charlotte -- the home of famous evangelist Billy Graham, who endorsed the ballot measure last week.

I recall when briefly looking at Raleigh as a possible relocation site that a wag noted that the Raleigh suburb of Cary was an acronym for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees. Looks like they had to expand the holding pen a bit.

Ford vs Schwinn?

Midland has been experimenting with bike routes and bike lanes as of late. It seems to echo a move back in the mid-70s to get people biking more. Back then, they at least had small bike lanes marked out on a number of roads where bikes would (in theory) have the right of way.

Emphasis on in theory. One of the problems of having bicycles in well-traveled areas is that cars going 25-45 MPH are interacting with 10-15 MPH bikes; that brings out the highway factoid that differences in speed is more of a problem than speed itself. The 21st century version of it has actual whole lanes dedicated to bikes on the three-lane one-way streets (Ashman and Rodd) going in and out of downtown from the northeast; that should minimize problems to some extent, as is routing bike routes through residential areas.

However, putting a lot of bikes on main drags creates problems, especially when bikes act like they are not subject to traffic laws, running lights and not paying attention to traffic. I've yet to see a bike get pulled over for bad driving. Even when bikes are playing by the rules, cars can treat them as pedestrians or worse, so the problems can run both ways.

Strangely, a BBC piece on Toronto's bike wars pulled my chatty ring. The BBC might have wandered into a minor skirmish between abrasive conservative mayor Rob Ford (think Chris Christie with about a third the charm) and Toronto's left. Previous Toronto governments have been more bike-friendly, and Ford is moving to be a bit more safety friendly and car friendly, which begs for a culture clash.

Not all bike-riders are liberals, but the activists generally are. Thus, the bile that has been flowing between Ford and the Hogtown left gets tacked on to this issue.

If you can build a bike expressway, like Midland has tried on the south side of town, turning the median of M-20 going out of downtown into an urban bike trail, you can be traffic-friendly and bike-friendly at the same time. If you don't have the free space to do that with and have cars and bikes coexisting on the same pavement, problems tend to crop up unless you're in a low-density subdivision setting, where working around a bike isn't a major issue.

One downside of bikes and cold-weather settings like Midland and Toronto is that they're not all that useful for about half the year. From about Halloween to early April, the weather is a bit too chilly to bike comfortably as temperatures go down towards freezing and below in the morning and you create your own 15MPH wind-chill. Even so, it's not a bad thing to encourage biking, but not at the cost of tying up traffic.

Food Network Meets Tru TV Meets ESPN?

Here's an interesting Detroit Free Press addition to the Delmon Young Jew-bashing story, discussing the millieu outside of the NY Hilton the Tigers were staying at-

The Hilton New York on 6th Avenue -- also known as the Avenue of the Americas -- is a favorite spot for professional sports teams. The Tigers are booked there for their weekend series. Only five blocks north of Times Square, the hotel is one of the city's largest. By day it bustles with tourists and the business activity of Midtown. By night it is home to dozens of sidewalk food vendors, many of them selling chicken kabobs and Halal food.

One vendor, who wanted to remain nameless, said that on most nights, say between 2:30-3 a.m., especially from Thursday to Saturday, drunken patrons spill from nearby bars and pubs and queue up at the trucks looking for something hot and spicy.

The food vendors set up on both sides of 6th Avenue at 52nd Street just across from the hotel entrance.

The food might be halal (I think that should be lower-case for the Muslim version of kosher), but Young was more haram in the wee hours of the morning.

[Update 4/28- The editors at the Free Press must of caught that, for a revised version goes with a lower-case halal.]

One thing that I have noticed in my late-night TV ramblings after a tutoring shift is that food trucks are a big item in bigger cities where they are allowed. New York has a long-standing tradition of street food (I'm reminded of the street hot dogs in Crocodlie Dundee as the analogue to the odd outback critters from their Aussie stay, she gives him the same retort he gave her-"tastes like [crap], but you can live on it.") which gets a late night twist in towns with an active night-life.

Getting people lubed up and on the street can be a recipe for disaster, and Young must have gone off his John Rocker.

Overcharge

I haven't seen anyone directly comment on the prospect that Florida officials may have gone a bit overboard with a 2nd-degree murder charge on Mr. Zimmerman. Here's the definition from the Florida code that will be a great aid to his defense team-italics added.

The unlawful killing of a human being, when perpetrated by any act imminently dangerous to another and evincing a depraved mind regardless of human life, although without any premeditated design to effect the death of any particular individual, is murder in the second degree...

That's going to be hard to prove. The fact that the guy was part of a neighborhood watch program points to something well short of the depraved psychopath the law is envisioning. To do that would require a major character assassination on the part of the prosecution, for it would only take one person our of twelve to say "whoa, isn't that a bit much for this scenario?"

If the prosecution is smart, they'll give the jury the option of a lower, manslaughter-type charge, which seems to better fit the case if self-defense isn't a good fit. However, that might not have been enough to keep the rhetorical lynch mob at bay who would want nothing short of a murder rap to be applied.

The Rodney King case comes to mind, where the first trial had the cops essentially up on attempted murder charges; when the jury was faced with the counter-argument that they were merely beating the crap out of King rather than trying to kill him, they took it and inadvertently set up some of the nastier rioting of my adult lifetime.

If a secondary charge isn't offered as an alternative, we're looking at a similar dynamic in the Treyvon case, where Zimmerman will be overcharged, acquitted and walking. That won't be pretty and will leave the White House of 2013 with the option of doing one of those "violate his civil rights" double-jeopardy end-runs to try him at the federal level as in the King case, assuming that the self-defense charge is weak enough to make a second trial hard to win for the feds.

Excellence in Burpcasting

I'm not with the conservative paradigm again; Breitbart's death did not leave me with the level of loss others did, nor do I want to go backing Rush for his latest foray into bad taste and poor political judgement. Advertisers are over-reacting, for a PG-13 Rush is nothing new; the Culture War button got pushed and good PC folks answered the call to abandon the good ship EIB.

Is there a double-standard? Not really.

If a liberal calls a conservative woman a slut, it is a generic insult, not a questioning of her sexual character; likewise, every guy who gets a anti-gay pejorative flung his way on a basketball court is set to be the next member of the Village People.

However, in this case, you had a woman who was in apparent need of birth control, which gets within hailing distance of earning the title, especially when Rush followed it up with a prurient request to watch her and her Obama-subsidized birth control in action. By that standard, Rush might get some fun watching my mom go through rehab with her Medicare-financed artificial knee; quite the party-starter, that one.

Also, you have a big talk-show host picking a fight with a previously-obscure liberal activist/law student, albeit one that became the poster girl for reproductive freedom for the left. Picking on Nancy Pelosi or another member of the congressional left would have been at Rush's weight class (pun not intended-he's trimmed down quite a bit since he got started).

Thus, Rush has a bit of a dressing-down coming. Not that it's the first time nor will it be the last. There are plenty of advertisers willing to pick up where the bailers left off and any station dropping Rush will see someone down the dial grab him up quickly. There's a market for what he does; all the left can do is make its minions steer clear.

One fringe benefit- any flak Rush is getting is stuff that isn't going the way of Rick Santorum or Republicans in general on the religious liberty-versus-contraception donnybrook. It took Super Tuesday off the front page long enough for Santorum to do well today.

Yes, liberal pundits get away with far more toxic rhetoric towards conservatives, but their clientelle is more used to R-rated language coming from their side and might feel prudish if they call them on it. That doesn't make two wrongs right.

A Pink Stink

If the Giants need an extra cornerback, they can check out the Komen folks, for they backpeddle very well to secular orthodoxy. I will leave it there for now, for I don't want to fire off ill-aimed salvos in the culture war.

Tickled Pink

It isn't often you get a general-purpose charity make a culturally-conservative stand, especially when it is a women-oriented one, but the news of the week is that the Komen breast cancer research folks stopped funding Planned Parenthood for breast cancer referrals; the link goes to a nice Megan McArdle piece on the issue.

Of course, the usual suspects on the left are up in arms, which brings forward the question of whether they are more pro-abortion or pro-liberal than they are pro-women. Everyone benefits from a reduction in breast cancer, while a thriving Planned Parenthood helps largely those on the left side of the ideological/theological spectrum; PP has some benign GYN activities, but abortion is its stock in trade.

So far, the new donors are outweighing the pulled donors. One would hope that would be the case.

The Disunited Way

I had seen reports a while back where the Kamen Foundation, the pink-ribbon breast cancer people, had contracted with Planned Parenthood to do some of the breast-cancer screening. Not to pay for any abortions, just for breast cancer screening. However, the association was enough to make Kamen persona non grata in certain quarters of the religious right.

In the news today was some fallout from that, where Lifeway, the Southern Baptist Convention owned publisher/bookstore chain, pulled some pink ribbon Bibles that had a $1 donation to Kamen as part of the package. They'll reuse the Bibles but ditch the promotional packaging. There's some good holy-hardware quip about blending the Word of God with cancer research fundraising, but that's another post.

The pink-ribbon brigade will of course castigate Lifeway-"the LifeWay move will hurt people who need breast cancer screenings", sayeth Darlene Jacobs. 

Yes, and the move of gay groups to boycott the Salvation Army over their orthodox view on sexuality will hurt the poor as well. The move of many United Ways to defund the Boy Scouts on similar grounds hurt boys as well.

Increasingly, communal efforts to do good will be shut down if the effort is seen to either be too conservative or too liberal in some way. Add that to the commercial boycotts, like Lowe's faux pas of this week, which merely gives oodles of publicity to an obscure show I hadn't even heard about prior to the ad-pull.

If there is no common society, there is no commonweal to defend and nourish. As we fragment into subcultures even within unhyphenated-American culture, those community institutions wind up becoming collateral damage in the disintegration.

 

Moroccan Mole

A Belgian of Moroccan descent shot up a marketplace in the Wallonian capital of Liege, killing at least three, with a fourth body found at the shooter's home. That puts things on the French-speaking side of Belgium. Since France has a colonial tie to Morocco (think of the French cop from Casablanca being shocked, shocked at the gambling), having alleged shooter Nordine Amrani in a French-speaking area makes some sense.

What is interesting in the BBC profile of Amrani (misspelling that into Armani might be fashionable), there seems to be no play on whether Islamic thought came into play at all. Amrani liked guns and pot and had a long rap sheet, but we don't know if he was just a European gun nut who happened to be Moroccan or whether he went jihadi on the town square. That might be a ghost worthy of a Get Religion piece.